Internal Links

Wondering if you’re offering a smooth user journey through your website? Here’s a hot tip for you: using and optimizing your internal link can add a level of professionalism to your site and could also improve your SEO! Here’s everything you need to know about internal links.

TRACK YOUR INTERNAL LINKS

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Templates using this KPI
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Integrations using this KPI

What are internal links?

Internal links are hyperlinks on a webpage that point to internal pages on the same domain that the webpage is on, as opposed to external links which link to other websites. Internal links are considered an important metric for SEO because they show that your site flows for a smooth user experience as well as enhances the site structure.

Alongside the number of internal links, you should also measure the click-through rate. The CTR of these links will help you find out if people are clicking on the linked pages or are consuming other relevant content on your website. They are not to be confused with backlinks, which are links coming from another website pointing to your web pages.

How to calculate internal links

The platform your website is hosted on, like WordPress, might have functionality for you to calculate the click-through rate of individual links, but other than that there isn’t a great way to measure it. External links are much easier to measure. You could count the number of internal links on a target page that point to other places on the same domain.

What is a good number of internal links?

If having an internal linking strategy important for you, each of your blog posts, product pages, or authority pages should have at least 2 to 4 internal links. Always think about quality over quantity though! This also varies based on the length of the page, the site architecture, and your overall content marketing strategy.

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What is a bad number of internal links?

Using too many or not enough internal links would be considered a bad practice. You don’t want to overwhelm your audience with navigation links in every sentence but you also don’t want your page to be an orphan page (dead-end) and not have the option to continue to a different page.

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Internal links KPI examples & templates

Links are great to measure in your monthly reports. Here are a few examples :

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SEO report template

A report with all the most important metrics for your SEO strategy, you can track your Google Search Console, Moz, Ahrefs, or SEMrush data, alongside google analytics or any other SEO tool. Track your keyword research strategies, broken links, search engine results pages, and dofollow/nofollow links!

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Ecommerce report template

A complete report with all the most important metrics for your eCommerce site, like shopping cart abandonment, click-through rate, net revenue, most visited product pages, etc.

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Digital marketing report template

From SEO to social media and PPC, this report gives you a good view of all your online marketing strategy metrics and overall online performance.

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Internal links best practices

Internal links can be a great way to help make your website feel intuitive and seamless. Here are some of the best practices to use in your link building process:

Use relevant anchor texts

When you want to point to a new page, you want to make sure that your internal link anchor text is relevant and descriptive. While poor anchor text doesn’t count against you for page ranking, when visitors to your website click a link and are directed to a page that is spammy or irrelevant, it can make them lose trust in your business. Having descriptive anchor texts could be almost as important as having relevant hrefs.

Use links that point to high-ranking pages on your site

To help your pages have a better internal linking strategy, make sure you’re linking to important pages on your website that have a higher ranking on search engines. Your link value will therefore go up. Another way to make people navigate to your website is to point to the homepage. You could also add a sidebar or redirect to your main navigation so people never feel lost.

Pay attention to your CTR

If you have too many internal links that aren’t being clicked, it could signal that you need to change something in your internal linking structure. Your anchor text might not be relevant enough, the pages linked to might not be interesting enough, or you could simply have too many links on the webpage. Be sure to use some external links in addition to your internal links to get your page noticed by web crawlers.

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